Claire Fullerton's Blog: A Writing Life - Posts Tagged "ca"

It’s not often enough that I’m handed the opportunity to reach through the veil of time and look at the cornerstone of my life. Yet there I was yesterday, in the commissary of a major movie studio in Culver City, California, in the company of three of the most effortlessly radiant Southern women to ever grace a linen topped table. I was there because I grew up with two of them, who are sisters, and in age old Southern style, I’d been summoned to lunch at the commissary because one of them has ties to the “business,” as it’s summarily called out here in California. The occasion sprang because their mother was visiting from Memphis, and I know well enough when I hear “Mama’s in town” to put on a dress and appear.
It’s been many years since I rubbed shoulders with any semblance of the players in the business. At one time I worked on their fringes, and even though the neck craning desire to swivel covertly at the relevance of who’s in the room has long since left me, I could feel them around me power-lunching in droll black suits just the same.
In the midst of this sat Mama Jane, as my friends mother is called: a Southern matriarch in possession of the real Delta Plantation accent—the kind that pitches and rolls with a hint of history; the kind now sadly washed flat by the globalization of subsequent generations to the point where you just don’t hear it anymore. She sat regal and delicate in the middle of an innate manner so feminine and refined that the three of us snapped into lady-like mode with straight spines, crossed legs, and napkins draped just so.
And the conversation was effervescent, as if a code of civility acquired from the relentless teaching of social niceties hovered like an assumed template over our heads. For one misshapen moment, the threat of politics suggested itself topically, but was waved away with a leaning cupped hand to the mouth and a “We don’t talk about that with Mama.” We were four Southern women lit from within by the gushing enthusiasm of being in each other’s company, smack in the middle of a room tense with its own importance.
“Now Claire likes a good story, and I’ve got one,” Mama Jane said. If I could do justice to the Civil War story by bringing in the variables of a forebear named Moses, a Presbyterian church in the Tennessee sticks, and Moses’ singlehanded deflection of the church’s destruction by fire, believe me, I would. Because the story was truly something. But I think I should just leave it with “You had to be there.” To tell you the truth, while Mama Jane was talking, I was so mesmerized by HOW she talked, that the story itself took a back seat. In that moment I couldn’t think of a soul more spellbindingly captivating, and I wished to heaven everyone sitting in the commissary of the movie studio would wake up to the most intriguing thing happening in the room.
It’s the little things that happen in daily life that bring me to my knees. People like Mama Jane and her two daughters, Southern as the day is long, incongruous as fish out of water in a Southern California setting, holding their own and shining like polished diamonds, completely unaware of their impact upon me for all their golden glory.
These are the moments worth living for; they are the moments that stay with me, and always the moments worth writing about.

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